Crayola Clan Blog

Since I can't play WAR anymore because it now requires me to enter the CD key from the CD that hasn't arrived yet, I guess this is a good opportunity to write down some more impressions of WAR.  (Yes, once again, people who pre-order games get screwed.)

• Bottom Line.  If you're sick to death of WoW gameplay, you won't find anything significantly new in WAR.  It's just different models and scenery and lore.  Fortunately for me, I only played WoW for about 2 months (out of its unbelievable 4 year lifespan).
• Classes.  There's an eclectic mixture of classes, most of which don't seem to fit into the traditional RPG class categories.  I'm having a lot of fun with the witch hunter class (a "melee DPS" class), although it's getting to be more of a struggle at level 11.
• Public Quests.  This is the best feature of the game so far, IMO.  They are broken into three "stages."  To take part, all you have to do is wander into a PQ area and do what it says in the upper-right corner of the screen (usually kill a bunch of mobs).  You get "influence" points by taking part, and if you collect enough points you get to pick out some cool gear and additional quests from a vendor.  You don't even have to be in a group or anything.  In fact you can usually finish off the first stage of public quests solo.  But once it moves on to the second or third stage, you have to have help because you typically face "champion" mobs that take a coordinated group effort to kill.  When the third stage of the quest is finished, everyone who participated (significantly) gets a chance at some cool loot.  Unfortunately, due to the population issue below, you don't run across very many people actually doing the public quests.
• PvE.  A lot of people are saying Mythic spent all their time on PvP and didn't flesh out the PvE, but I find that's not the case at all.  There's plenty of quests to do in PvE, at least through level 11 -- in fact there's a lot more quests available than you really need.  Admittedly there's not much of a storyline, but that's true in almost every RPG game I've ever seen.  Just like WoW, you end up skimming through the badly written quest text to the part where it says what you really need to do.  (They spend so much money on production values for these games now you'd think they could afford to hire a real wordsmith to put some interesting text in those quest dialogs.)
• Scenarios.  Very similar (by which I mean basically identical) to WoW battlegrounds, but easier to access.  They are kind of fun, but they're awfully chaotic.  I don't know how everyone else does PvP, but for me it's just a lot of mad button-mashing on the keyboard and out-of-control circle-strafing.  You really can't see anything that's going on when you're in the middle of a group of 20 people fighting it out (at least I can't).  I just try to stay close to the group, use "target closest enemy" a lot, and somehow I get experience points out of it.
• RvR.  RvR (realm vs. realm) is supposed to be the biggest feature of WAR.  Unfortunately it's something you really need a group or guild to enjoy so I can't give it much of a fair review.  Whenever I wander into the open RvR areas (to fulfill quests) I get ganked by somebody who clearly has a lot more PvP experience than me, so I run like a screaming little girl from 1-on-1 encounters (not that that helps -- you might as well stand and fight).
• Bugs.  There are some glitches here and there with mob positioning (sometimes mobs will just disappear), but that's not a big deal.  There is one major bug though when you select influence rewards -- sometimes the items never appear in your backpack, which really sucks.  Yesterday I purposefully ground on stage 1 public quest mobs to get my influence up to the highest level so I could get a nice sword and armor, and the gear just vanished.  And of course the vendor wouldn't give me the stuff again.  Not cool.  Maybe it's just the beta client.
• Lag.  There is some, but I haven't been killed because of it so it's no big deal.
• Grinding.  Thankfully, there isn't much.  Those annoying quests where you have to get 5 things from mobs but they only drop the thing 1% of the time are entirely gone.  When you get a quest to kill 5 things, you go out and kill 5 things and come back, period.  It rocks.  (So far all of the quests are to kill things or find things, by the way.  No escort quests.)
• Mobs.  Unlike WoW, you can actually survive if you're unexpectedly jumped by 2 or 3 mobs.  I hated that about WoW.
• Population.  On Grimnir, I hardly ever run into anyone else competing for the same quests, and most of the public quests are actually empty.  Wait times for scenarios are tolerable.  Sometimes there's no waiting at all.
• Running.  There are times when you need to do an annoying amount of running back and forth (at least in Norsca) to turn in quests, but for the most part it's minimal.  You have to go to a flight master to get from one realm to another; you can't just run there.
• Backpack.  It's too small, as usual.  It gets filled up with crafting supplies very fast.  You automatically get more space every 10 levels, but I haven't seen where you can buy any larger packs or anything, and I haven't found a bank yet.  On the plus side, the backpack "filter" options are very cool.  It lets you automatically put certain types of items into different packs.
• Gold.  There is definitely no shortage of money.  You can easily afford to buy the best stuff at merchants.  So yeah, don't waste your money with Korean gold farmers (and yes I've seen in-game ads for that already).
• Gathering.  I picked "scavenging" as my gathering skill and so far I'm not sure it's worth it.  Basically it lets you pick up extra crafting supplies from corpses, but I haven't been able to actually do much with the supplies except sell them.
• Crafting.  I picked "apothecary" as my crafting skill and up to about skill level 35 I haven't been able to make anything useful.  You pick up far better potions as loot.  I'm not sure, but I think you can re-train your gathering and crafting skills if you change your mind, which is cool.  Crafting is an area of the game that needs work -- you get the impression that the game designers spent more time thinking about PvP than crafting.
• Death.  There's basicallly no penalty for dying as far as I can tell, except for the time it takes to run back to where you died.  (And you don't even need to do that in PvE.)  You don't lose experience, you don't lose items, and you don't become a ghost.  There's a small, cumulative penalty on your total hit points for about 15 minutes, but there's always a healer NPC right there where you respawn that will remove the penalty for a microscopic fee.

Here's my witch hunter Otteinmed (yes, a random name).  The picture is not at all representative of the in-game character.  In the game he actually looks a lot like NBC Political Director Chuck Todd.